Chef and author Sallie Ann Robinson hasn’t met a stranger. After a day-long workshop with the children at Hilton Head Island School for the Creative Arts, the Daufuskie native, smiling and laughing, was still ready to talk for another hour about her next big project.

The Gullah Diva, as she calls herself, will be on the Travel Channel’s “Bizarre Foods” on Monday.

While in Savannah and the Lowcountry, show host Andrew Zimmern enjoys some meals with The Lady Chablis, learns how to trap octopus in Beaufort, hunts marsh hens in Thunderbolt, Ga., and, of course, has a home-cooked meal on Daufuskie Island.

Robinson cooks barbecue raccoon with the show host and takes him through the process of preparing wild game.

“It was awesome, and that’s not a word I throw out much,” Robinson said. “Andrew Zimmern is one of the coolest men you want to meet. You say, ‘Jump,’ and he say, ‘How high?’ He likes new things. He’ll try anything, and then you see him smack, (and say,)‘Hmm, very interesting taste, but I like it!’”

Robinson said she watches “Bizarre Foods” when she can.

“I love the show,” she said. “It deals with food and crazy to some folks, bizarre to others, but to me, a lot of that stuff is normal growing up on Daufuskie.”

Her favorite shows are done in Japan, she said, “Stuff that is bizarre to me based on bugs and spiders and I’m like, ‘Oh no, no, no, no, no… Andrew you don’t do that.’”

Robinson is not new to television. She’s been on shows on the Food Network and QVC, as well as several local television shows all over the east coast. Eventually, she said, she would like to have her own cooking show.

Robinson, a sixth-generation descendent on Daufuskie, said she learned to cook from her mother in the kitchen, and she hopes to teach others some of the same tricks she learned.

“Raccoon, it’s a wild game,” she said. “It is not a fatty meat, a very lean meat. It depends on how you cook raccoon, you will not taste the wild in it. When I cook raccoon, and I’ve cooked it for numerous people who have never had it, and they say it does not taste like a wild game meat. Some people soak and put it in vinegar, and I’m like, ‘Y’all are killing the meat!’ I use herbs. I use my basic thyme and garlic for wild game that really eliminates that wildness.

“My mom, who was an excellent cook, I mean she knew how to tame a pot,” she continued. “She could tame a pot, take anything wild and tame it. You would never know it was out there running in the woods. I love the wild game, basically because they don’t have preservative, no additive. Raccoon doesn’t eat meat other than oysters and clam and berries. They’re very clean animal. Cleaner than the hot dog and bologna you eat.”

Robinson said she would not eat a raccoon from the city, though.

“There is a difference between the city coon and the country coon,” she said.

For “Bizarre Foods,” Robinson said she thought the taping went extremely well, and she heard rave reviews from the people on the show. She said she gets excited the entire experience.

“It’s not just doing the shows, or being with people or cooking the food, it’s the love for it,” she said. “Like pop used to tell us, he said, ‘Be the best, be the best, and once you’ve done your best, it’s up to the rest.’”

The food was not the only bizarre part of her segment, Robinson said.

“The thing about the raccoon, cooking it was one thing, but I skinned it. I mussed it,” she said. “I just want everyone to see it and know that we womens can do it too. And most of all, don’t knock it til you try it.”

Robinson’s third cookbook will focus on complete dinner menus. It is tentatively scheduled for publication in late 2012.

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